Monday, March 24, 2014

Time for a 21st Century US Foreign Policy

With 16,000 of the world’s 17,000 nuclear
bombs in the US and Russia, the US should certainly not be fanning the fires
for a new cold war after the distressing events in Crimea and the
Ukraine.

Rather, we should acknowledge our broken
promise to Gorbachev that we wouldn’t expand NATO if Russia didn’t object to a
reunified Germany’s entry into NATO when the wall came down, and promise not to
invite the Ukraine or Georgia to become members of our old Cold War military
alliance.

We should be disbanding NATO and working
for reform of the UN system so that it can fulfill its peacekeeping mission
without archaic reliance on regional military competitive
alliances. Further, we should remove our missiles from Poland,
Romania and Turkey and negotiate the space weapons ban which China and Russia
repeatedly proposed, and which only the US blocked for several years in the
UN’s committee on Disarmament in Geneva which requires consensus.

We should also reinstate the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which Bush walked out of in 2001 and take up
Russia’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyberwarfare, which it proposed
after the US boasted about its virus attack on Iran’s enrichment facilities and
which the US rejected out of hand.

We need to stop being the world’s bully,
as described last week by Jack Matlock, Reagan and Bush’s Ambassador to Russia
who has examined our provocative actions towards Russia which resulted in these
terrible events in Crimea.

It’s ironic that Obama is now in the Hague
at his third “Nuclear Security Summit” to talk about locking down and securing
loose bomb-making materials, without any discussion about how to honor our Non-Proliferation
Treaty promise to eliminate our massive nuclear arsenal, for which we are
planning to spend $640 billion over the next ten years for two new bomb
factories, and new lethal delivery systems—missiles, planes, submarines.

The sad history of our bad faith
relationships with Gorbachev and Putin and our aggressive military
provocations, including today’s announcement that NATO will be doing military
war games in Poland, will do nothing to make our world a safer, more peaceful
place.

The US needs more creative 21st century
thinking on how to relate to the rest of the world.